


how lucky, how lonely

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Pushing Daisies
Genre: F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-11-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 13:04:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2652998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ned listens to the whole story, about Warren and Jonathan, the bullet, the flaying, the darkness, and says: "Yes."</p>
            </blockquote>





	how lucky, how lonely

**Author's Note:**

> For purplefringe.

Ned listens to the whole story, about Warren and Jonathan, the bullet, the flaying, the darkness. Then he puts the cloth he was holding down onto the counter, smoothes down his apron, and says: "Yes."

"You only got her word for it," Emerson points out, when they step outside so Willow and Giles can bring the guy in with a cloth gag stuffed in his mouth and knots around his wrists and some kind of sharp-smelling incense burning. "You gonna be judge, jury, and executioner on her say-so?"

Ned says nothing, looks through the glass at Chuck pulling a pie from the oven. 

"Oh, no," Emerson says, " _don't_ you be, let he who is without sin…"

"We're all-"

"– do not say these words, pie man – "

"Sinners." Ned shakes his head and opens the door to the Pie Hole. "No innocents," he adds, and in that long, hot summer night he gets in the car and starts driving, listening to the radio blurring between static and something old and heartbreaking, aware of the stilled bodies. ("As good as dead," Giles had said, while Ned wondered what the myrrh would do to the taste of his pies. "After what she did to him. You don't – you should be careful.")

Out there in the dark of the desert's open space he lifts the dead girl and lays her down, the sixtieth second silent as his hands leave her skin. "Your shirt," she says, and then, "Willow?"

"Ned," he tells her, sits cross-legged next to her under a sky stained with the light of a thousand stars. "You've been dead a while."

"I guessed," she says. They dressed her. No blood, no pain. She sits up and looks at him properly. "You're a witch, too?"

"Something like that." He gives her a smile. "Actually, I make pie. Er, with fruit, not lost children or anything like that."

She laughs at that, a strange bell-like sound in this dead distant place, and he smiles in return. "I have to," he says awkwardly, "uh. There's a price."

She nods; she understands, and she doesn't help him dig the grave, but she sits beside him as he does. It's shallow but the sun here will be bright and ruthless, the land all around littered with bleached and cracking bones. "Thank you," she says, and then, "About that pie" – and Ned did find one in the car under the shovels, cold and crisp, made of fresh fruit. They eat it quietly. 

"Come on," he says, after a while, "time to go home" – and this time she sits up front. Ned has been awake all night and those long straight lines are blurring before his eyes, but sometimes she sings. The radio only plays love songs. When they get to the Pie Hole and Tara gets out of the car, Ned thinks he will hear that shriek forever, in dreams. 

After that, Willow is silent. She holds Tara's hand as though she's a fragile thing, a thing with the glue in the cracks still settling, and leads her into the Pie Hole under the bell, and says, "You came back to me" – still with reticence, and reverence, like every word now spoken is precious. 

Ned wants to tell her that it's life itself that is precious, that life is precious without fragility, that he's felt it move between his skin and another's and that everything breaks down to possibility: there can be a whole world of love and honey and promise and long night drives and fresh fruit under a clarity of stars, if only life. And redemption, too, for those not buried shallow under the desert, with his own sweat the only marker in the dust. 

"We're gonna," Willow is saying, "we're gonna... uh, we'll be back, we just, I, ah."

They go out through the front door into that rising sunlight, holding on to each other, and Ned sits down hard on the edge of a table and Chuck's gloved hands thread through his hair and even Emerson, awake early and nursing a cup of coffee, has a soft look to him in the dawn.

"I love you," Chuck says, because it needs saying; Emerson says, "You ain't got to bear others' sins for them, pie man" – but there's kindness there. They'll open late today, but the kitchen already smells of baking, everything bright and clean and sweet.


End file.
